Why the Best Restaurants in Los Angeles Aren't The Trendy Ones

Sure, LA is fully of new, hip, vibrant, farm-to-table everything. But some of the city's best restaurants are the old-school classics where the vibe is even more important than the food.

If you’ve picked up a food magazine lately, you may have read that Los Angeles is the most exciting dining city in America. This is true! L.A. is home to a diverse landscape of regional Mexican food, the best toothpick lamb this side of Chengdu, and galbijjim as good as your Korean auntie made in Seoul. The produce in Southern California is so good that even a plate of raw turnips can be memorable. But the truth is that some of the greatest restaurants in L.A. serve none of these things. The greatest restaurants in Los Angeles serve pretty mediocre food.

This, of course, all depends on what you believe makes a great restaurant. The types of establishments that I’m talking about have all survived at least a half a century of food trends and economic downturns. They serve steak and creamed spinach and they deliver a basket of warm bread with foil-wrapped packets of butter to your table when you sit down. Their dining rooms hum and glow effortlessly—everyone looks good in their light of their sconces. There are plenty of cushy leather booths, a well-stocked bar, and a staff of career service professionals who will never introduce themselves by their first name or explain “how we do things here.” On their menus, small plates are referred to as “appetizers.”

The most well-worn example is Musso & Frank Grill, the 98-year-old Hollywood mainstay where the closest thing to a signature dish is a martini: stirred, never shaken, and served glacially cold with a sidecar on ice. The food menu is full of culinary artifacts like Crab Louie and Lobster Thermidor, but this is not a place for dabbling in throwback nostalgia. The key to dining well at Musso’s is to find your order, and never deviate. For Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold, that means a chiffonade salad with anchovies, Welsh rarebit and two Gibsons. My dinner at Musso’s is made up entirely of cocktails–one shrimp, one avocado (served with Thousand Island dressing), and two gin–plus a side of French fries, which I highly recommend as a buffer between your stomach and the second martini.

There is no shortage of words written about the magic of Musso’s. Charlie Chaplin, Bette Davis, Orson Welles and Charles Bukowski were all regulars. Every story, interview, and profile on the restaurant mentions the celebrity clientele, the worn leather banquets, the cigarette smoke-stained mural, and the graying service staff, many who have been hustling in those red jackets and black bowties longer than you’ve been alive. No one mentions the food, but on a Saturday night the wait for a table rivals that at Salazar, which this very publication voted one of 2017’s best new restaurants.

There is a timeless pleasure to Musso’s, but the food is better at Taylor’s Steakhouse, a 64-year-old windowless joint on a busy stretch in Koreatown with $3 valet and a moderately priced American steakhouse menu. From the outside it looks like shady billiards joint, but step inside and you half expect to see Don Draper in one of the horseshoe-shaped Naugahyde booths.

For Kris Yenbamroong, whose Night + Market restaurants top the list of required L.A. dining, Taylor’s is on his regular rotation. “It’s iconic,” he says, “it’s not that I think the food is immaculate, it just happens to be the kind of food I like to eat.”

“I obviously go to new places too, but there is that thing with new restaurants, and I would include us in this too,” he says of Night + Market, “where there are a lot of ideas and concepts to unpack and it can become a little tedious. Taylor’s is a place you can go and get really good steaks, a couple martinis and a bottle of wine and not have a narrative crammed down your throat.” In a city full of hot new trends, it can feel like a relief.

The same can be said for Pacific Dining Car, a quirky hideaway on 6th Street in Downtown L.A. where the tag line is “Always Open. Always Outstanding.” The former is definitely true, and the latter is accurate when you’re drunkenly devouring their roast beef hash at 3am. I would say that the shrimp cocktail is outstanding too, but at $36 for four crustaceans it is also outrageous.

If you’re on the Westside of L.A., Chez Jay in Santa Monica is the spot for a wedge salad, checkered tablecloths and chilled martinis, and in West Hollywood it’s Dan Tana’s, the Hollywood favorite where Harry Dean Stanton has been a regular for some 40 years. Chez Jay, which sits barely a ship's length from the Santa Monica Pier, has been spared from beach-front developers thanks to the city declaring it a landmark in 2012. L.A. loves fast culture, but miraculously, all of these places stand still in time.

These are the type of L.A. restaurants where you aspire to become a regular. You may not eat a life-changing steak or discover a new culinary tradition you were previously unaware of, but you won’t go hungry and you are sure to have a good time, and sometimes that is all you need from a restaurant.

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